


well respected man about town

by uppityroman



Category: Green Wing
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Character Study, F/M, Introspection, M/M, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29163810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uppityroman/pseuds/uppityroman
Summary: Mac is definitely NOT a rebel. Although he's not NOT one, either.ORThe author self projects his Bisexual Musings™ onto a character for no damn reason. This might be a mess and is basically just an excuse for me to do a character study of Mac, but oh well.
Relationships: Holly Hawkes/Mac Macartney, Mac Macartney/Caroline Todd, Mac Macartney/Guy Secretan, sort of - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	well respected man about town

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to post this, but hypothetical_otters inspired me to post some of my Queer Mac stuff because I adore him and I need a place to project. So thank you, check out their GW fic too it's lovely!

Mac had never been a particularly rambunctious child. Not the way his parents thought he was, anyway. They had always said he was trying to 'rebel', but he never saw it that way. He didn't use his first name because he didn't want to. He grew his hair long because he liked it that way. He listened to rock music and wore band tees and plastered the walls of his room with pictures of motorbikes and film stars because it made him feel good. None of it was because he wanted to rebel, but his father brustled every time he mentioned Ray Davies and his mother held her hand to her heart and stared at the ceiling when he left the house in anything remotely resembling rock and roll, so he kept himself to himself, at least around them. He did his work, he got good grades, and pacified them with school awards. 

Medical school was a relief for them all. 

His father had always told him that the best way to make an impression at uni was to go down to the pub of his first night, show the other blokes exactly how many pints he could get down him, and show what kind of a man he was. But when Mac pierces his earlobe with a small hoop, pulls on his new-but-still-considerably-secondhand leather jacket, and sets out to find the campest club he can, he doesn't think that what his dad meant.

 _He certainly did_ _make an impression,_ he thinks, as a man at the bar buys him a third shot. It burns his throat as he downs it in one, before being discarded by the others, and he almost slips off of the barstool as he gets up to find the toilets. 

Mac grins at himself in the mirror, the black smudges under his eyes, previously carefully drawn lines, is evidence of a night well-spent. He stumbles out moments later to find the man at the bar waiting for him, cocktail in one hand and pint in the other. He can’t help grinning again. 

No, then. Definitely _not_ what his father had in mind. 

Uni is boring, long, and tiring. Class, work, class, work, and then back again. He calls his parents to get money for books. He gets a job at a nondescript secondhand shop to get money for his cocktail habit. It’s good. His roommate, a physiotherapy major by the name of Richard introduces him to hash, and that’s good too. He ignores his mother telling him there’s no room for a surgeon who has an earring and ignores his father telling him to stay away from anyone ‘with more hair than brains’.

Mac turns nineteen at two-seventeen in the morning, on the red leather couch in his dorm room with a girl called Dana that’s in a few of his classes. She likes his posters and his leather jacket, and he likes her mouth. Specifically, he likes kissing it. 

She likes his mouth too, but she likes other people’s more, and they split up a week later. She sleeps with a bloke in their lecture hall, James, but it’s fine because then Mac does too. The red couch sees more than it’s fair share of action those few weeks, but then James freaks out on him and leaves in the middle of the night. They don’t talk much after that.

He calls his parents once a week, and watches them grumble as he tells them about Lucy and Megan and Diane. (“It’s a new girl every week, son. That’s not the way to go.”) He doesn’t tell them about Lewis and Mark and Andrew, or any of the others, because that’s not even a road he wants to step a _toe_ down, nevermind barrel down headfirst. 

When he graduates, it’s near the top of his class. His parents are pleased, he’s pleased (-ish), and all is well. He’s referred to a teaching hospital, an ‘East Hampton’, and he takes the job gratefully. It’s far away from his parents, at the very least.

He doesn’t resent them. He’s just tired.

Mac rents a flat about a twenty-minute drive from work. The job is challenging, and apart from the occasional and aggressive attention from Sue White, resident madwoman, it’s generally quite nice.

A year in, Holly shows up. She’s energetic and smart, and very very pretty. They go out for drinks a few times after work. Mac doesn’t order cocktails anymore, though, and maybe it’s for the best. Holly laughs at his jokes and holds his upper arm as they sit at the bar. Then they go out some more. 

Two years in, _Guy_ shows up. He’s annoying and rude, with an ego the size of a fucking boat, and teeth to match. Mac wants to hate him, but they get pints together a few times, and then they can’t seem to shake each other. Mac talks about Holly, about work, and about how surgeons are undoubtedly superior to anaesthetists in every measurable way. Guy brags about his sexual exploits in graphic detail, makes cruel jokes about the other pub-goers, and says that surgeons are like monkeys with blades. He's also Swiss, as he feels the need to emphasise every ten fucking seconds. If Mac wasn't so annoyed by it, it might be endearing. A bit.

When Mac tells him he’s thinking of asking Holly to move in with him, Guy rolls his eyes and curls his lip in a way that makes him look even more like a donkey than he did before. 

“She’s not figured out you’re a massive gay yet, then?” Mac blanches. _He never told-_ “I mean with that hair, you’ve got to be,” Guy continues, scoffing and downing the rest of his pint. Mac almost punches him, but restrains himself. 

“Mhmm. That’s right, I’m a big old gay, because of my _hair._ So I take it you’re one because of your fancy skin products, then?”

“Wanker.”

“Yeah, fuck you too, mate.”

The panic subsides slightly but doesn’t leave. Mostly because he hadn’t even thought about it like that until then. He thinks about James for a moment, all wavy bronze hair and pink cheeks, then glances back at Guy, with his big teeth and strange nose and a smug expression on his face.

Cock.

Holly moves in. His parents adore everything about her, which he hates. She reorganises his closet, which he also hates. She kisses him and does crosswords with him and they dance to The Kinks in the kitchen, which he loves. She calls him _‘pretty’,_ as well as handsome, and he kind of loves that too. It sends a spark up his spine whenever she says it. He’s _pretty._ Good god. 

He loves it, he loves _her,_ and sometimes it frightens him how much. 

The first time Guy hears her say it, he bursts out laughing, banging his hand on the table, and Mac raises one well-trained eyebrow. 

“Jealous, Secretan? It’s alright, you can say you think I’m pretty.”

Guy scoffs and makes another tasteless joke about Mac looking like a girl, but the tips of his ears are pink and he leaves the room a moment later. Holly laughs and kisses his cheek. 

When she tells him she’s pregnant, some years later, he’s ecstatic. When she tells him she’s not keeping it, he breaks, just a bit, on the inside. When, a week later, she packs up boxes in their- in _his_ bedroom and tells him it’s over, he can’t look at her.

America is very far away. 

He gets pissed at the pub, more so than he has since university. When Guy swears at him in the carpark, telling him to _‘grow the fuck up, you great pouf,’_ Mac punches him. Pretty hard. Guy spits blood into the bushes and calls him a wanker, giving him two fingers for extra measure. Regardless, he drives Mac home, blasting the loudest music he can on the stereo, (George Michael, Mac’s not going to point out the irony in _that_ ), and for a moment, Mac can’t decide if it would be better to kiss the dickhead and get it over with or punch him again. _Except_ , _no,_ a part of his brain pipes up, _that’s a bloody terrible idea. You’re so, so drunk._ _You wouldn’t even be thinking that if you weren’t so broken up about Holly._

Holly. Fuck. Six years. Six _fucking_ years. 

Guy drags him up the stairs to his flat and deposits him on the sofa unceremoniously, muttering something about 'like carrying a bag of fucking sand'. Silence falls as Mac mashes his face into the couch cushions, and he feels Guy brush a hand on his arm as he leaves. Then the pressure and warmth are gone, the door slams shut, and he sinks into sleep.

He doesn’t go back into work for a week. When he does, it’s to find Guy has been made his new, full-time anaesthetist. He throws the memo into the bin by the front desk and ignores Guy’s bruised jaw. 

He buys a motorbike. His mother is furious, about Holly and the motorbike. 

Holly was good and safe and lovely, and now he’s stuck with Sue White doting on him more than ever, And Guy _bloody_ Secretan going on about how he should be happy he’s finally gotten rid of the old ball and chain. 

Guy doesn’t apologise, and neither does Mac, but they go out to gets pints that week nevertheless, and a mutual understanding is created. It’s better than nothing, Mac muses as he watches Guy fucking with Martin, one of the junior doctors. He’s not sure exactly _how long_ Martin has been a junior doctor, but it’s long enough for him to know that all Guy wants is the attention. Or maybe not, Martin’s naivety astounds him sometimes. 

A Holly-less year passes, and she is dubbed quite a few not-so-nice nicknames by some of the doctors. Mac doesn’t rise to them, but every time she’s mentioned his stomach cramps and he has to step out of the room for a moment. 

Guy takes up trying to teach him poker, something Guy seems to not only not know the rules to, but think he’s brilliant at, and Mac takes great joy in beating him multiple times in a row. 

It’s an odd friendship, to say the least. The amount of midnight calls Mac gets from the bar about his ‘idiot friend’ being passed out in one of the booths runs into double figures. Guy spends a good number of nights kipping on Mac’s sofa, face down into the cushions. 

He watches Guy repel women with his terrible sense of humour and disgusting arrogance, and Guy mocks him for his lack of trying with girls at all.

“I’m starting to think you are gay, after all,” Guy says in surgery. Mac brandishes his scalpel at him, and he shuts up.

But Mac worries. 

When Caroline shows up, she’s confused, frustrated, and very sarcastic. He loves it. He plays it cool, does his best _Doctor Mac,_ and doesn’t mention Holly. 

And really, he couldn’t have made a bigger mess of it. 

She kisses Guy, and then she kisses _him,_ and a few other people in between, Mac isn’t sure, maybe even Sue White. Mac doesn't kiss Guy, but he wants to, for whatever bloody reason. And as much as Mac wants to say _fuck the lot of them,_ surgery is a lot more interesting with Caroline _and_ Guy there, and good god, it's a bloody disaster. 

Either way. Maybe it’s easiest not to think about it.

He sits with Guy at the pub and jokes, and laughs, and watched Guy make a fool out of himself, and it’s nice. Interesting. He plays games with Caroline in surgery, and he likes it. A lot.

Mac isn’t a rebel. Never wanted to be, never was one, but he can’t help feeling just a bit rebellious, just a bit, inside, when he beats Guy at snooker a few times, watching the Swiss twat’s face flicker with something like awe, before returning to well-rehearsed cocky-ness, or when he makes Caroline snort into her hand in the break room at some joke he tells, all even voice and casual pose, trying not to let on how pleased he is. He likes making Guy chew on his lip and pretend not to be going bright red whenever Mac _really_ turns on the charm, and he likes making Caroline giggle at his faux swagger. 

So yes, maybe a rebel. Just a bit, anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure the dad-pub story is a misquoted memory of something from a Robert Webb interview. I thought it fit here. I hope this made sense, I wrote it in a haze in the middle of the night.


End file.
